Interview

“There is a need for KM in the Indian enterprise”

Knowledge Management (KM) is not a coffee table discussion topic anymore. A serious effort to make KM a useful tool in a company’s IT infrastructure is underway. Ambarish Dasgupta, executive director, PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) in an interview with Gaurav Patra, discusses the Indian KM space and PwC’s offerings

* How serious are Indian companies when it comes to adoption of best practices? How will best practices help in formulating future roadmaps for companies?

Best practices is a very common term in the consulting community. KM activity in India has been happening for a long time now and has a very important role in improving future business strategies of companies. This is especially true in the case of any product development management, as it is one of the major applications of knowledge management.

A good KM repository captured on earlier products helps a lot during the release of new products. Also, if you have a good inferencing mechanism on top of the KM repository (which is an important requirement), it is akin to human intelligence, which works better. Otherwise, KM is no way different from standard database management.

KM is fast becoming a major competitive edge, especially for companies involved in R&D. However, success in Indian companies depends on how open or flexible they are.

* How do you assess a company’s readiness for KM?

In the global best practices that we use there is a readymade ‘readiness’ test available. For instance, if a person is doing something interesting and innovative in a company and is asked to put down his experience in some form for his colleagues/company to use, he may be a bit reluctant to do it. Apart from apprehensions and nervousness there can also be sheer boredom.

One of the main factors for KM software or KM consulting to be successful is to automatically capture all communication or activities taking place on the network and replicate it on the KM repository. One can take the help of artificial intelligence tools or software rather than being dependent on the individual to give out information. This leads to a much more successful KM implementation. The people factor also plays an important part while assessing a company’s readiness for KM.

* What is the reason behind KM not being an all-pervasive concept in India so far?

There are two problem areas. One is the mindset and another is the openness/readiness of companies. Although KM is a solution yet it has to mimic human intelligence to a large extent. If we cannot mimic human intelligence properly in terms of inferencing the conclusion from the repository, it is very difficult to succeed. In back-office automation or an ERP kind of automation, one does not need to put incorporate higher levels of intelligence into the software as it is an operational automation. Considering the number of constraints in which an organisation or an individual works, this solution has to very flexible. During KM implementation, companies should keep in mind factors like flexibility of the solution, proper mimic machinery and inferencing the proper conclusion. These are critical factors.

* How big is the KM market in India and what are the opportunities for PwC in this market?

I do not have any numbers on that but this is one of our focus areas. In the consulting industry, the market is always proportional to the amount of effort that goes into creating it. This is because we have to make customers realise about the need, which in turn will help in market growth. But there is definitely a need for KM in the Indian enterprise.

* What value-add will PwC provide in the KM space?

The advantage that PwC enjoys in this field is its expertise in different domains. We can also assess KM-related investments or what exactly the company’s requirement is, depending on what business it is in. What also matters is its level of preparedness or the culture or style of operation. Once it is assessed, we can also find the degree of investment or complexity of that KM project and how it can evolve in a phased manner. On top of that we can also help in identifying the solutions that are available in the market and can also advise companies on the required customisation of the same. Apart from implementation, we also do post- implementation auditing, which means that we can help companies in benchmarking against their expected results and what they have finally achieved.